New books from Eliza Griswold, director of the Humanities Council’s Program in Journalism and Ferris Professor of Journalism, and Vinson Cunningham, Ferris Professor of Journalism in Spring 2025 and visiting lecturer in the Council, are featured on 2024 year-end “best of” lists.
“Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church” by Eliza Griswold is included in The New Yorker Best Books of 2024, The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2024, The Washington Post 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction from 2024, NPR Books We Love 2024 and Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2024: Religion, among many others. Publishers Weekly writes: “Pulitzer winner Griswold paints an indelible portrait of the interpersonal tensions, internal biases, and gaps between utopian ideals and messy reality that unraveled a progressive Philadelphia church in 2023.” Read more about this book in a Q&A with Griswold on the Humanities Council’s Faculty Bookshelf.
“Great Expectations” by Vinson Cunningham is included in The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2024, NPR Books We Love 2024, The Washington Post 50 Notable Works of Fiction from 2024, and Esquire’s Best Books of 2024 (So Far). NPR writes about Cunningham’s first novel: “Full of sharp observations about our precarious system of government, it’s also insightful about race and wealth and the relationship between the two.”